May 30, 2007

From down-under... google announces Google Gears an open source technology for creating offline web applications. Google is offering Google Gears as a free, fully open source technology in order to help every web application, not just Google applications. As a first example of what is possible, the Google Reader™ feed reader (http://reader.google.com) is available today with Gears-enabled offline capabilities. Google Gears works with all major browsers on all major platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux. Google Gears is available now at http://gears.google.com.

Also out of devday in Australia is some news we'll be hearing about in a few hours here in San Jose... a solution for easier mashup creation - Google Mashup Editor, an experimental online code editor for building mashups using a simple markup language. Aimed at developers familiar with HTML and JavaScript, the Google Mashup Editor offers a simpler way to deploy AJAX user interface components atop existing feeds and Google web services. By substituting extended XHTML tags for entire blocks of JavaScript code and hosting the mashups on Google servers, the Google Mashup Editor speeds mashup creation and fosters more powerful, more interesting web applications.

On a side note, I just caught the 11 o'clock news here in San Jose. Seems that people being interviewed in the Bay area are a bit concerned that the new Google Street Side imagery may be a little to good in some cases... the concern is that people's faces are clearly discernable in many scenes. Imagine this, perhaps you were comminng out of Secrets Adult Shop on Market St. when the imagery was being collected... would you want your mug front and center leaving Sectrets?? No doubt we'll be hearing more about this over the coming weeks... Apparently Google has commented that they will gladly remove or obscure any images that cause people concern.